Dell Acquires AppAsure, an Application-Recovery Provider

Dell, continuing to forge ahead with its strategy of morphing into a cloud infrastructure and services company, on Feb. 24 acquired Reston, Va.-based backup and replication software maker AppAssure Software.

Terms of the transaction were not released by Dell. The deal marks the company's 12th acquisition in the past two years and the first under the leadership of new software division President John Swainson, a former CEO of CA Inc. who joined Dell late last year.

Swainson, also a veteran executive for IBM, Visa and Cadence Software, is credited with refreshing and turning around CA's fortunes after the company had fallen on hard times in the last decade. He heads up a reconfigured software division for Dell, a clear indicator of how serious the Austin, Texas-based corporation is about changing its business model.

Six-year-old AppAssure will plug an important hole in Dell's data center portfolio because it specializes in providing what it claims to be "near-instant and 100 percent reliable" bare-metal data center application recovery in case of a power outage, human error, or other unexpected IT or environmental failure.